Marriage Based Green Card Application: Evidence of Divorce

A United States Citizen or Legal Permanent Resident can apply for their spouse to join them in the US. Applicants can sponsor their spouses, who are inside the United States by a process called adjustment of status or through consular processing if they are outside the U.S.

If the application is approved, the spouse is authorized to live and work in the US and a Legal Permanent Residence Card, otherwise known as a Green Card, is issued as evidence of their new status.

An individual who files a petition with the United States Immigration and Immigration Service (USCIS) to sponsor a spouse for adjustment of status, must show that they are properly married to the beneficiary.

They are required to provide a divorce decree as proof that any previous marriage was properly dissolved before the current marriage. A divorce decree absolute is the legal document evidencing the formal end of a marriage and is sufficient proof of dissolution for the purposes of a green card application.

The following are some requirements that a divorce decree submitted to USCIS as evidence must meet.

• The decree must be issued at a court of competent jurisdiction in the country where the divorce was settled. For example, in Nigeria, the High Court of a state with jurisdiction over matrimonial causes is competent to dissolve a marriage celebrated under the Marriage Act (Registry Marriage). Customary Courts have jurisdiction over customary and Islamic marriages.
• Parties are required to be present in court to give evidence in divorce proceedings. If the applicant or beneficiary was already in the US at the time of their divorce case, the divorce document could be flagged as fake.
• The decree absolute should be recorded in the court’s registry, discoverable through a common search. Any purported unrecorded document is very likely to be unacceptable to USCIS as evidence of proper dissolution of marriage.
• Official signatures on the document must be the same as signatures of court officials in service on the date of the divorce, not signatures of officials in service at the time of the search.
• Statutory steps for divorce in that country must be seen to have been followed.
• The divorce document must proceed from the same court where the marriage was dissolved. For instance, if the marriage was dissolved in a court in Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, the decree absolute should also proceed from that court and not a court sitting elsewhere, unless there is a reason for the discrepancy.